View full sizeKalamazoo Gazette file photo.Animated: Brian Tindall speaks to a crowd during a session at the Kalamazoo Animation Festival International event in 2005.EMERYVILLE, Calif. — It wasn't an Academy Award, but for Parchment High School and Western Michigan University graduate Brian Tindall it was even better.

Facing stiff competition from animated films "Coraline," "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" and "Monsters vs. Aliens," Tindall, who has worked for Pixar Animation Studios for the past 10 years, heard his name called at the 8th Annual VES Awards ceremony for his work on Pixar's "Up."

Tindall, character modeler and articulator for the movie's main character, Carl, won an award for Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Feature Motion Picture for his part in the "No Dad Scene" of the movie. The presentation was made Feb. 28 at the Visual Effects Studio Awards at the Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif.

"It's basically like your Academy Award for what I do," Tindall said from California in a telephone interview. "It's what everybody works in their career for in this type of field."

Tindall's co-winners of the award were Ed Asner, who supplied Carl's voice; Ron Zorman, for his animation; and Carmen Ngai, the character cloth artist. All but Asner, who was preparing to attend the Oscars the following week, were there for the presentation.

“UP” ended up winning the Oscar for feature animation at Sunday’s Academy Awards. Tindall said only four names are allowed on the VES Awards ballot, but many more put in a lot of work, so he accepted the award on their behalf. "The people I thanked were the people who helped me bring this character to life," he said.

Tindall, who has worked on several Pixar characters, from past movies to a movie scheduled for release in fall 2011, explained his job as a character technical director this way:

"I put all the controls into a character for the animator … to bring the character to life," he said. For the movie "Up," he said, "I modeled all the Carls, all the Ellies, and then both Muntzes (representing them at various life stages), and then I articulated the Carl you see on the screen and old Muntz and younger Muntz, and also participated in all three Ellies and the younger Carls to bring them to life."

Articulation, he explained, is "the art of moving points in space. … What we do is we take an entire character and we put a thousand controls in there to control every little bit of what the animator wants to do," he said.

With a character's face, he said, "there's so many controls in there your head can spin sometimes."

Tindall, whose parents, Judy and Dan, live in Richland, graduated from Parchment High School in 1985. He went on to WMU, where he got a degree in industrial design.

Hoping for a career in animation, he headed west in 1994 and worked in various studios for about six years before landing the job with Pixar.

A week after Tindall and the others received the VES Award, "Up" won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.

"That's always a really fantastic feeling, especially when you work on the lead character and the villain and then you get nominated and then you win it," he said. "It's just icing on the cake."